07/06/2020
An except from the book Black People and the Five Pillars by Mkhulu Mbazo:
Observance of the Sabbath.
Deuteronomy 5:12
โObserve the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, 14 but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your ox, nor your donkey, nor any of your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.
Many people regard the observance of the Sabbath as a religious ritual while it actually forms part of our culture. It also highlights the amount of knowledge that we lost overtime. If we carefully analyze the usage of certain words, we realize that the African people not only observe the same festivals and holy days as outlined in the Old Testament, but they also followed the Hebrew Calendar.
In fact, the months are not named after some Roman gods, but they have meanings and signify the seasonal cycles. Further, the Nguni people followed the lunar cycle, meaning the first day of each month begins with the sighting of a new moon. It is important for one to understand these facts because true African Renaissance lies in us reclaiming our Hebrew heritage.
When one studies the account of creation, one realizes that the seven days of the week are referred to as the first day, the second day, the third day, the fourth day, the fifth day, the sixth day and the last day which is the Sabbath, the day of rest.
In Zulu, these days are accordingly known as โuMsombulukoโ which means first day, โuLwesibiliโ, which means second day, โuLwesithathuโ, which means third day, uLwesine, which means fourth, uLwesihlanu, which means fifth, and then you have the missing link: which is supposed to be โuLwesithuphaโ and โuLwesikhombisaโ, the sixth and the seventh day respectively. But interestingly enough, there is a day called โuMgqibeloโ which means the last day.
It is easy to understand the origin of the missing link when you recall that African people had no specific day of worshipping God called Sunday before the arrival of Christianity. We all know of course that in the original calendar before it was changed by the Romans, the first day was on what is known today as Sunday and the last day, the Sabbath, was on what is known today as Saturday.
You may as well know that the current days of the week are named after Roman gods. You also understand of course that the year was not always counted from January?
What makes this even more interesting is that the Prophet Shembe (when he established Ibandla lamaNazaretha at the beginning of the last century), restored most of the cultures of the Zulu people which can be traced directly into the Bible and the most important of these was the observance of the Sabbath, which still forms part of their practices even to this day.
The Prophet Shembe introduced the observance of this day on the simple understanding of it being part of the cultures of the Zulu people that were eroded and forgotten during the time of their degeneration.
It is very fascinating how quickly we forget history. One of the stories I was told as a child was of a shape that looked like a woman in the moon carrying a child on her back and a pile of wood on her head.
The story went that she was taken into the moon for having gathered wood on the Sabbath, which was a day where there was not supposed to be any work. I was told that the picture served as a reminder of the punishment that follows when one works on the Sabbath. Perhaps you might look at the moon next time and not see the image I am talking about.
But that would mean you are not getting the point. The point is not about the image in the moon. The moral of that story was that there was a certain day in which people were not supposed to work, and if they worked on that day, there was a retribution that followed!
And the day in question was the Sabbath, which falls on what is today known as Saturday. So the question becomes, if African people did not observe the Sabbath at some point in history, how did they know about it in the first place that it would even go into their legends?
I hope you now understand why the observance of this ritual is tricky as it involves the whole order of how the world works. But it also teaches us a valuable lesson about how we should not always take for granted what we think we know and not know. It raises serious questions about how governments work and I hope you will recall this topic when we discuss below the unnatural state we live in which is a consequence of a deeply fallen state of mind.
โUmkhosi wokweshwamaโ (The Feast of First Fruits).
Leviticus 23:9-14
And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 10 โSpeak to the children of Israel, and say to them: โWhen you come into the land which I give to you, and reap its harvest, then you shall bring a sheaf of the first fruits of your harvest to the priest. 11 He shall wave the sheaf before the Lord, to be accepted on your behalf; on the day after the Sabbath the priest shall wave it. 12 And you shall offer on that day, when you wave the sheaf, a male lamb of the first year, without blemish, as a burnt offering to the Lord. 13 Its grain offering shall be two-tenths of an ephah of fine flour mixed with oil, an offering made by fire to the Lord, for a sweet aroma; and its drink offering shall be of wine, one-fourth of a hin. 14 You shall eat neither bread nor parched grain nor fresh grain until the same day that you have brought an offering to your God; it shall be a statute forever throughout your generations in all your dwellings.
We can see from reading this verse that this is one ceremony that has been preserved by the Zulu people almost in its entirety. The celebration of the first fruits takes place annually in Zululand in December. This is a time when people bring their first harvest of the year to the king. The Zulu Monarch tastes and eats the first produce.
He presents the fruits to the God of creation who made the first fruits possible. He then prays to God to bless the land so that it can give forth more fruits. The king performs these duties because as we have seen above, historically, he was the high priest of the nation.
This is also the reason why before we eat and drink we dedicate the food and the drinks to the ancestors first before we enjoy them.
